SAC outlines ambitious Higg scaling plans

brett mathews | 7th November 2018

SAN FRANCISCO – Sustainable Apparel Coalition CEO, Jason Kibbey, has told Apparel Insider about its ambitious growth targets as it looks to scale its programme for improving the environmental footprint of the multi-trillion dollar global apparel industry. “What we will see over the next few of years is 20, 30, perhaps 40,000 facilities working with us,” Kibbey told us. “I think that will happen based on the membership requirements we have put in place and the commitments by our members to use SAC tools.”

In a wide-ranging interview to appear in our forthcoming printed magazine, he continued: “Right now we have over 10,000 manufacturers working with our tools – that is a remarkably fast uptake and we have shown 20-25 per cent growth every year. That is as good as we could have hoped for. In fact, I would be hard pressed to find another measurement system that has scaled as quickly as ours.”

Kibbey said that particularly pleasing has been ongoing improvement in the Higg scores of individual facilities. He added: “One of the things I am personally most proud of is that if you look at results year over year Higg Index scores both on the facilities side and the brand side show improvement when looking at same company or facilities scores – and they get better every year. That is a pretty big shift in the industry overall which in the past was about compliance or ‘just doing enough’. This all ties in what we say at the SAC which is that measurement leads to improvement which instigates innovation.”

The full interview will appear in the next printed edition of Apparel Insider. To subscribe, click HERE.